Avenatti Reportedly Tied to Major Clinton Donor and Professor With Ties to Russia Dossier

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, has been on television and his face has been plastered all over the internet for months now. This guy is either really connected or he’s telling an extremely salacious story. It seems like CNN and MSNBC have him on their networks every other day.

Avenatti’s connections seem to go much deeper than the press. He is now being tied to a key Clinton Foundation donor as well as a professor with ties to the infamous unverified Trump dossier.

While rich and connected people tend to also know other rich and connected people, this isn’t just guilt by association. There’s currently a great deal of speculation about where Avenatti got the money to represent Daniels — and while he claims he got it from crowdfunding and Daniels herself, there’s a fair amount of doubt regarding this.

Avenatti, 47, is known to be an avid sports car racer, even having raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2015. One of his co-drivers in that event was none other than Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family:

Al Saud is a very specific member of the royal family. His father is Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, the man responsible for leading Saudi Arabia’s intelligence when the 9/11 attacks took place.

Turki is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, which wasn’t strange as a foreign eminence before Election Day in 2016.

In 2015, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former ambassador to the U.S. and member of the Saudi royal family who has attended annual meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative, made donations in 2013 and 2014, though exact dates aren’t available.”

They also reported that Turki and Bill Clinton had met while studying at Georgetown. When the article was written, Turki’s staff would not comment on Turki’s donations or the nature of his relationship with the Clinton family.

We are now aware that the Clinton campaign helped to fund the Fusion GPS dossier. The dossier touched on Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud is a “mysterious Maltese professor who allegedly has links to the Kremlin and told former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos about ‘dirt’ Russia may have on Hillary Clinton,” according to Conservative Tribune.

While this doesn’t tie Avenatti to the Clinton Foundation, directly, and while it doesn’t link the shady Clinton Foundation to Mifsud’s part in the Trump dossier, it does open our eyes a bit wider. We are left wondering how Avenatti got into some protected information that any given lawyer would not have access to.

The Hill’s Op-Ed contributor Mark Penn reported how Avenatti got his hands on the “detailed financial information” in order to file a report on money that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, received. He wrote, “he didn’t find it on Google.”

“This is the kind of information that would have been known only by the Treasury Department, his banks or by prosecutors, raising some serious questions about what kind of operation Avenatti is running. Is there a team of people digging this up? Are they paying off sources? Is Fusion GPS involved?” Penn wrote.

The Tribune writes:

An awful lot of questions about Avenatti’s sudden rise to media cynosure need to be answered, and they don’t stop with where his money came from. Avenatti claims he’s received payment for the Daniels case from the porn star herself and from crowdfunding, although Daniels has previously said she isn’t paying for her representation and crowdfunding generally doesn’t buy the kind of enthusiasm and omnipresence Avenatti has brought to the case.

Is there any connection to the Clinton Foundation or Fusion GPS? It could simply be randomness, but some sort of legitimate connection is far from out of the question, especially given the quality of opposition research Avenatti — heretofore mostly a high-end cultural ambulance chaser — seems to have been able to dredge up. For all of his loquaciousness, Avenatti seems loath to discuss details about how he got involved in the case and who’s paying for him.

The media had better stop ignoring the facts and start doing their job.